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Hi pals! To celebrate the release of Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion of Big Tech by the great tech journo Brian Merchant (Buy it! Read it! It’s terrific!), we’re reupping our conversation with Brian from back in June — which, between the OpenAI shakeup, Hollywood strikes, and the growing number of Big Tech antitrust cases, has only become more relevant since then. It’s also a great complement to our previous episode on the decline of the digital third space, in which we contrast a certain prominent venture capitalist’s techno-optimist manifesto with some of the ideas from Brian’s book.
Have you ever fantasized about smashing your phone or throwing your computer into the sea? If so, you’re in good company, because today’s episode is all about the story of the Luddites, an underground network of early 19th century machinists and textile workers in England who took up arms against industrialists looking to automate them out of a job. They did this, quite literally, by smashing the machines that threatened to put downward pressure on their wages and flood the market with poorly made imitations of the goods they were producing. Sound familiar?
Their real story — and the story of how the word “Luddite” came to connote being “bad at technology,” which is the opposite of what these people were — is the subject of Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion of Big Tech, an engrossing and exhaustively researched new book by Los Angeles Times technology columnist and Terraform co-founder Brian Merchant. It isn’t due out until September, but given all the chatter that’s been happening around tools like Midjourney and ChatGPT, we didn’t want to wait to have him on.
Brian joins us to discuss how the Luddites were actually an early iteration of the labor movement — not anti-tech, but anti-exploitation — the eerie similarities between the systems of automation these workers were up against and AI, and what a 2023 version of the Luddite movement might look like. Hint: It’s already happening, and it has nothing to do with smashing out phones, though you do you.
Follow Brian on Twitter
Order Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech
Read more by Brian:
“What it looks like when jobs disappear in the shadow of AI” (Los Angeles Times)
“Afraid of AI? The startups selling it want you to be” (Los Angeles Times)
“You’ve got the Luddites all wrong” (VICE)
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ENCORE: Lessons from the Luddites for the digital age